A teenage girl who developed an “emotional attachment” with a convicted school shooter has been accused of plotting a massacre at her high school which she branded “Parkland part two,” police say.
Trinity Shockley, 18, was arrested at Mooresville High School in Mooresville, Indiana, after allegedly planning an attack for Friday on the seventh anniversary of the Parkland school shooting – which saw 17 students and staff gunned down on Valentine’s Day in 2018.
The suspect was charged Thursday with one felony count of conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of intimidation with a threat to commit terrorism, court records show. She is being held in the Morgan County jail in Martinsville without bond.
Mooresville Metropolitan Police Department detectives received details on a person suspected of plotting the massacre by the FBI at about 7 p.m. on Tuesday before later identifying Shockley, police said.
She was taken into custody after police and the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office executed search warrants at her home.
Shockley’s father owns an AR-15 and an armored vest, though they were not kept in the house, police said.
Writing on the instant messaging service Discord, the teen allegedly said that the shooting would be “Parkland part two,” according to authorities.
Detectives said that Shockley had an obsession with Nikolas Cruz, the convicted murderer behind the Parkland school shooting; Dylan Roof, a neo-Nazi who shot dead nine people inside of a historically Black South Carolina Church in 2015; and Randy Stair, the so-called “YouTube Killer” who killed three supermarket co-workers on 2017, before taking his own life.
All three men were found on a collage of mass murderers in the defendant’s bedroom, police say.
A poster of the film 2002 film Zero Day, a movie about two boys who conduct a school shooting, was also hung on Shockley’s wall and taken into evidence by detectives, per the filing.
The girl also allegedly signed off an excerpt in her notebook, “Hail Elliot Rodger! Supreme Gentleman!,” who killed six people in a stabbing and shooting spree in California in 2014 before turning the gun on himself.
However, police said Shockley’s main motivation for the attack was Cruz. She had allegedly been planning the attack for over a year.
“Trinity's motivation for making the plan is Cruz. She wanted to prove that she is his number one fan,” a detective wrote in a probable cause document. “Trinity has an emotional attachment to Cruz.”
The defendant also boasted on the Discord chat that she had access to an AR-15, the same rifle used by Cruz in the mass shooting, according to court documents.
Shockley had sought mental health resources from her school district since she was a freshman, per the filings.
Each time, her father, Timothy Shockley, would allegedly deny access to those resources because he “did not believe in mental health treatment”.
